Does Nation Building Work?

Japan and Germany after World War II are the stock examples of succesful nation building. Iraq may become a stock example of unsuccesful nation building. But we can't learn very much from these examples if we don't know the population from which the sample was drawn. In other words, how many
times has nation building been tried and how many times has it succeeded?

In an important paper in the Independent Review (not yet online but go ahead and subscribe - I am an assistant editor), James Payne starts the difficult job of assembing the population and examining the results. Payne defines nation building as "the use of ground troops to support a deliberative effort to create a democracy." Using this definition, he identifies 52 instances of nation building, all by the United States or Great Britain from the period 1850 to 2000. (The list is in the extension). Of these he identifies 14 or just 27 percent where the treatment could be considered a success, success defined as maintaining some semblance of democracy after ground troops were withdrawn.

Twenty-seven percent is not encouraging especially when we note that this is the raw percentage - some of these nations could have become democracies absent the intervention so the true success rate is probably lower.

Defining nation building and its success requires some judgment calls so there is plenty to quibble about in Payne's analysis. Nevertheless, with so many people pontificating about nation building it's good to see the first steps being taken to define exactly what it is that we are talking about.

Nation-building Military Occupations by the
United States and Great Britain, 1850-2000

Twenty-seven percent is not encouraging especially when we note that this is the raw percentage – some of these nations could have become democracies absent the intervention so the true success rate is probably lower.

Payne defines nation building as “the use of ground troops to support a deliberative effort to create a democracy.”

Let’s have a similar study on the kind of nation building Hilzoy is talking about over at Obsidian Wings:

When I ask myself which political unit has done the most to promote democracy since the fall of the Berlin wall, the answer seems clear: it’s the European Union. The EU has helped immeasurably in the transformation of Eastern European countries into (mostly) functional democracies. Moreover, it is responsible for the one clear success story about democracy promotion in the Muslim world: the enormous changes that have occurred in Turkey over the last fifteen years or so.

South Korea counts as a failure because when the US removed the bulk of its forces, it was still a dictatorship; it made its way to democracy only recently, and while US troops were present, they were not particularly involved.

There is one important question left unanswered by the study. That is, did the U.S. want to built democracies? The three occupations in Nicaragua for instance, or take Cuba, were they meant to built democracies; or only to install U.S. friendly regimes? Because if the latter thing was the goal, the success rate could well be much much higher.

Setting the bar at democracy is too high. That is the ideal, but a less than horrible and reasonably unaggressive dictatorship with some liberal tendencies may well be a practical and sensible goal especially if it advances interests in the region and forestalls much worse (e.g. communism). Taiwan and South Korea being excellent examples of where that path can lead.

There’s definitely some debate about what “nation building” means. As some of the commenters above indicated, most of those “interventions” were not intended to build free, happy, or democratic governments. For better or worse, they were designed to mitigate threats to the government sponsoring the intervention.

It’s not really meaningful to complain that such occupations didn’t create democracies when that wasn’t their aim. From an amoral, Machiavellian perspective, we need to examine how successful these occupations were at their true goal — preventing further threats to the US (or the UK). In that light, more of these experiments seem to be “successful.”

The study is definitely very interesting though. More research would be fruitful. 🙂

I’m confused by the British examples. The vast majority of them are nothing more than the dates of British colonial administration of the territories in question, which territory’s boundaries were defined by the British themselves. Disregarding the idea of building of a nation where there never was one, it is a stretch to imagine that the entirety of the British colonial period was an attempt to spread democracy. Even the hurried attempts to install successor governments as they retreated from the colonies can only be regarded as half hearted at best. Oddly enough the one colony in which Britain managed to install a functioning democracy: India, or at least the parts that are not now Pakistan or Bangladesh, is not on the list.

And I have no idea how the installation of yet another Latin American dictator: Dominican Republic 1965-1967, is scored as a success on the US’ card.

I vaguely remember GWB in the 2000 campaign saying that he was against the notion of nation building. At the time I thought there would be relatively little difference between he and Gore winning the election.

The British did not intend nor implement any steps to install democracy. Indian democracy was built by Indians, not the British. Indians may have had inspiration from the democracy practiced in Britain, but that was the extent of the influence.

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